Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back

By Jorge Rivas Oct 12, 2009

OK Cupid, an online dating site, processed the "messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well."
via OK Cupid: When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor.

The takeaway here is that although race shouldn’t matter in messaging, it does. A lot. Some interesting findings: • White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. OK Cupid were careful to preselect the data pool so that height and physical attractiveness (as measured by the site’s picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. • White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Latina women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. •Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder. Read more statistics and findings at OkTrends, OKCupid’s official blog. RaceWire commends Ok Cupid for analyzing and making this data public.

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